Incredible but unusable...yet
So I have been testing/developing with FluentCart (Pro, if that makes a difference), trying my absolute best to replace Woo as our primary eCommerce driver and everything was going really well until I stumbled across a huge issue... Synced billing and prorated subscriptions.
With WooSubscriptions, you get settings in the global options as well as on the product/subscription level, which allows you to optionally synchronise subscription renewals on specific dates (screenshots attached). This allows us to implement service-specific business logic that follows a calendar-based schedule instead of a "monthly" or "annual" schedule. For example, we have services that run from a specific start date to a specific end date in the calendar year. If our customer registers after the start date, they are pro-rated for the time between the current date and the next billing run - say on the 25th of each month. We require a full calendar month's notice when a customer wishes to cancel their subsection and said notice needs to be submitted before the current month's billing cycle - so before the 25th. We then hook into all of these events and execute custom logic and workflows based on the event and object data. I assume this is how many coaches, schools or universities would run their services as well, but this type of setup is not achievable unless we can synchronise the billing date. It would also be great if we could manually set/adjust the billing date for specific subscriptions before/after they have been created/activated - see third screenshot.
I've considered building this functionality from scratch but I don't want to put in all that effort only for the Fluent/WPManageNinja team to create something way better in half the time. I also figured that this functionality ought to be handled in Core, in any event? I assume this would be dependent on the infrastructure that FluentCart uses to handle subscription payments - are they handled through the card processor (i.e can only manage through Stripe/similar website) or is the billing cycle actually stored on the WP instance through the use of card tokenisation and a cron service?
FluentCart really is an incredible piece of software but unfortunately it won't be suitable for our specific use case until we can add this functionality 😢
We do not have this feature, and it's unlikely we'll build anything similar within our current plan. Hopefully, this feature will come when we have dedicated Invoicing. We are utilizing payment providers subscription management. Due to this we can't support all type of payment gateway right now.
So i guess you building a solution for this will be worthwhile at least in the forseeable future.
Hi Rasel Siddiqe , thanks for the response! Yes, I had a feeling that the gateway would handle the logic for subscriptions, which makes this functionality more difficult to create. It would likely need to be gateway-specific as opposed to a catch-all for all gateways. Is there any chance that the Fluent team would consider implementing the cron-scheduler from FluentCRM into the Class structure of FluentCart? Then simply extend the payments API and Hooks to include methods for storing card tokens? This would go a long way in helping others custom develop their own subscription solutions, which can then be shared/passed on to the community at large.... So instead of developing everything for each gateway, you provide a standardised way to store tokens and billing cycle meta that runs in the background through cron - developers can then go wild with their own solutions?
Spoke to the devs and shared your take. They believe the Invoicing solution will address many of these issues. Really appreciate the time and thought you've put into this. Looking forward to having you onboard with us, once the improvements are made.
Great! Thanks for following up on this for me. I look forward to future updates!